by Dara Kerr/WEST OAKLAND
DeFremery Park is at the dead center of West Oakland; it’s a pocket of green with basketball courts that are usually empty and frayed nets on the tennis courts. High school students walk past the park as they go in and out of school, and century-old Victorian homes line one side of the park while warehouses line the other.
It’s the place where Angela Davis declared in 1969, “What we have to talk about now is a united force, which sees the liberation of the Vietnamese people as intricately linked up with the liberation of black and brown and exploited white people in this society, and only this kind of a united front, only this kind of a united force can be victorious.”
K-Dub, Town Park founder
Today, there’s a different call to action happening in DeFremery. In the busiest corner of the park, a tall man with dreads to his waist and ever-present sunglasses is very much in charge.
Keith K-Dub Williams is the driving force behind the Town Park skatepark, and the neighborhood kids literally jump to please him.
“K-Dub says do jumping jacks,” he shouted to a trio of kids, and they did jumping jacks. “K-Dub says bounce on one foot,” and they bounced on one foot. “K-Dub is bigger than Simon, so you better do what K-Dub says.” They’ll do what he tells them, maybe because he’s six-foot-five, or maybe because they just love him so much.
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K-Dub was born in South Central, Los Angeles in 1963. South Central in the ‘60s and ‘70s was a diverse neighborhood. “There were white people, Japanese, Filipinos, but then it seemed like a bus came by and all those folks left,” K-Dub says.
“I was there a little bit before all the gang stuff,” he says. “When it did click in, I was already in college, and that is when it started to be a whole other level, and we were losing folks left and right.”
There are similarities between South Central and West Oakland, even though people are moving into West Oakland rather than leaving. The two areas share a heritage of serious violence and crime.
“Oakland is dealing with stuff now,” K-Dub says. “It’s territorial stuff, somebody takes your parking space or looks at you cross-eyed, and the only way you can’t be shown up is to take a life.”
Eighteen people have been murdered in West Oakland so far this year, and 24 were murdered in 2007. Crime analysis by CQ Press indicates that Oakland has the fifth-highest crime rate in the U.S.
“Everybody seems like they are afraid of these kids, instead of talking to them,” says K-Dub. “From teaching here I know at least 6 students who are no longer here because of a bullet, and I’m sure none of them warranted it.”
Town Park ramp
What could he do to help change these kids lives? Art was K-Dub’s way.
He reaches out to kids by painting murals. His first mural was in a Los Angeles school near where he grew up. This landed him a job with the Los Angeles parks and recreation program painting murals. “They gave me about 30 kids and a huge store front to paint and we just did it up,” he says.
An old friend, Cliff Ross, says K-Dub was painting a mural by his house in Los Angeles when they first met. There was this huge sign K-Dub hung up that said, “honk if you like it,” and people would drive by honking.
“He would get anybody to paint, it was like he had this big coloring book on the wall, and he’d get prostitutes, gang-bangers, anybody who’d come by to paint,” says Ross.
When K-Dub moved to Oakland from Los Angeles in 1995, he started teaching art, first at Havenscourt Middle School then at Oakland High. He eventually became the Co-Director of the Visual Art Academy at Oakland High.
Ross moved up north with K-Dub and also became a teacher. He says he owes it all to K-Dub. “I was into some bad stuff and he talked me into leaving that whole life. He’s my mentor, he’s why I’m here, he’s why I teach.”
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As a kid, K-Dub started drawing by copying the cartoons he watched after school; this is how he developed his style with bold, clashing colors and playful characters. But instead of fantasy world plots, he drew about what he knew – African-American urban youth culture and inner city life.
Classmates started asking him to draw on their folders or design their letterman jackets. He kept drawing and then majored in art at Long Beach State, always keeping with his same style and themes.
Since then, he’s shown his art in galleries, worked on collaborations at the Oakland Museum, the Children’s Museum of Art and had 12 murals around Oakland and a dozen more in Los Angeles.
But it’s not about hanging art on the wall for K-Dub, it’s about how to make art accessible to people who normally don’t see it. “It started by taking the ‘I’ out my own personal exhibition thing,” he says. “With public art, I saw that I could make people smile and kids laugh, and that is really powerful.
“With hanging work in a gallery you really don’t have that kind of connection with folks on a everyday level,” he says. “Being a creative person is much more than “gallery gatherings”, it should be about some kind of dialog that’s not always praise-related.
Mural by K-Dub
Driving through West Oakland you can spot K-Dub’s art on walls and schools. Murals of kids playing and dancing with distinct references to Oakland, like images of kids wearing Oakland A’s baseball hats.
One of his first public shows in Oakland was at DeFremery Park, where he hung artwork in the community center. Once the art was up, he went to the local schools and invited teachers to bring their classes so he could explain the work and draw with the kids.
Now, back in DeFremery, 13 years later, K-Dub has begun to pull people together for a new canvas. “That’s what I see this skate park as being – a canvas we roll out and kids light up with art or skateboarding,” he says. “It’s a sculptural, working, moving, breathing art piece and I get way more enjoyment out of that.”
Teaching at Oakland High was what brought K-Dub back into the skateboard world. As a teenager, he skated with his South Central friends, but one day broke his ankle in two places doing a front-side rock ’n’ roll on a wet ramp and quit skateboarding.
When some kids came to his class with skateboards, he helped them start a skateboard club and took them to different East Bay skateparks after school.
“After seeing how skateboarding was really starting to be picked up by urban youth,” he says, “I started examining the culture and looking at the way it was going.”
One of his jobs at the Visual Art Academy at Oakland High was finding community partners for the academy. Comet skateboards was one of those partners, he worked with them to let his students design two skateboards.
K-Dub also had his students build and paint a skateboard ramp in their classroom. He asked local skater Roger Lin to come skate the ramp with some friends. “It was cool to see kids who had built and decorated this thing so excited to have us skate on it,” Lin says. “K-Dub has got to be the only teacher in the country that built a skateboard ramp in his classroom.”
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A month ago, K-Dub was filling a Penske Rental truck with wood panels donated from the new development hi-rise in downtown Oakland, “The Uptown.” The construction workers stared in curiosity as he haphazardly loaded the wood onto a forklift and piled it into the truck. K-Dub says that the Uptown’s developers heard that Town Park needed more wood, called him and said “come and get it and bring it to the hood, bring it to West Oakland.”
Loading wood from "The Uptown"
Town Park is the first skatepark in West Oakland, and just about everything in it has been donated. On a piece of land about the size of two basketball courts, the park has mini-ramps, table-tops, grind rails and more are constantly being built. For the past year, volunteers, from professional carpenters to teenagers walking by, have worked endless hours building this park.
K-Dub, who has not earned a dime from the city, has also put in at least $20,000 from his own pocket.
“It’s a hand-me down park with beautiful people making it happen,” he says.
It should be completely finished soon, after the city sends out its engineers to check the nuts and bolts, secure the decks on the ramps and give their seal of approval.
“I’m probably gonna cry when they come out,” says K-Dub.
Even though it isn’t officially done, kids skate here everyday. If K-Dub is around, he’ll open the gates and let them in. If he’s not around, they’ll jump the fence despite the two no trespassing signs he posted.
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But Town Park isn’t the only thing K-Dub has going on.
As he stepped back into the skate world, he saw that urban youth wasn’t being represented by the skateboard industry. He went to the 2004 Summer X Games in Los Angeles and saw diversity in the crowd but not with the skaters.
He met professional skater Karl Watson there. Watson grew up in Oakland and agreed with K-Dub. “We saw something missing and wanted that void to be filled,” Watson says. K-Dub told Watson, “If you can get the skaters, I’ll bring everything else, the community, the spot, and we can make it happen.”
Playing off the name “X Games,” they decided to name their event “Hood Games.”
The first Hood Games happened at the East Oakland Youth Development Center in 2005. To prepare for the event, K-Dub asked the local skate shop in downtown Oakland, Clean, if they had any ramps he could use. This is where he met Ben Winslow, Town Park’s head carpenter/designer, and their collaboration began.
Winslow’s first thought was “there’s a really big dude in my shop asking for ramps.” He wasn’t sure what the event would be like but was curious, so he brought K-Dub some ramps.
“It was on this rough parking lot where they had laid down plywood and screwed Masonite on top,” he says. “Then I set up the ramps and it was a really fun day.”
Winslow has since designed most of the ramps for the 10 Hood Games K-Dub has organized, some of which have had up to 2000 people, and they have taken place in East Oakland, downtown Oakland, the Tenderloin and South Central Los Angeles.
Town Park skating obstacles
Besides professional skateboard demos and contests for the kids, the Hood Games also have dance battles, DJ performances, and graffiti “thrown-downs” where artists compete to create art while being timed.
“What makes Hood Games powerful is that we add all elements in one event,” says Kara Fortune, the Visual Arts Coordinator and Co-founder of Hood Games. “It’s like a kaleidoscope experience.”
Part of the idea of Hood Games is bringing these events to urban neighborhoods, and even though these are often dangerous neighborhoods, things have always gone smoothly.
During the Hood Games in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, a man was stabbed nearby. He walked over to the Hood Games event to get emergency attention from the ambulance on duty for possible skate injuries.
“We had tons of police officers there and I was sure they were going to shut us down,” says K-Dub, but instead the police said, “What you guys are doing is about the best thing ever to happen in this area, keep it going.”
He takes the cops words seriously; he wants to keep it going – to continue to fight for change for urban youth. With his combined street smarts and cultural sensibility K-Dub has managed to mix art, skateboarding and education while bringing together a force of people to join his cause.
But this is only the beginning.
K-Dub’s goal is to take Hood Games nationwide, beyond California, making it a model for urban neighborhoods all over the U.S. But the key to making that work is having Town Park as the anchor and home site.
“Even though this neighborhood probably needs a million other things, as far as recreation it needs to be here,” he says.
“I’m trying to be the glue and the bridges to make it all happen. Putting the right people with the right energy and just getting this off the ground. The fact is – that it is a struggle, but the kids don’t need to know that, they just need to know they can come skate and have fun.”
VIDEO: TOWN PARK by Dara Kerr
